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.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

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

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.

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

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.