I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.