It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.