Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

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