A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to the window to see what it was.