Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.