What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.

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