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

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.