I read to make myself feel awake.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.