When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

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