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

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.

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

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.

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

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