Every moment before this one depends on this one.

I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker. [...] I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.

I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.