You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.