Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.