I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.

I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

Character is the plot in many ways

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.