The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.