All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.