The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

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.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

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.