I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

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

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

All wisdom ends in paradox.