I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.

They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

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

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson