The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.