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.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close 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.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

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

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