You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

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.

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.