Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

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

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

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

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

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

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.