The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.