One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.

So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.