For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.