Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

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.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

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