One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.