In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.