I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.

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

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.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

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.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

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