Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.