I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.

My life is a reading list.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.