He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.