The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

Sexy means loving someone you donot know.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.