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.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

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

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

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

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.