Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.