Whenever I get into something, I shut out everything else.

I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

I can never say what I want to say, it's been like this for a while now. I try to say something but all I get are wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this can't catch her.