Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.