I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.