I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.