The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

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

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.