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

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

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

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

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

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.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.