I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

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.

With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise.

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.