Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

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

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

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.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

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

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