We're physical objects, we think of ourselves as these kind of free-floating brains, but the brain is such a little part. It's way smaller than we like to think. We think we're these important human beings. We're not animals or anything. But what did we come out of? What are we made out of? We're made of the same stuff as out there.

Why is nostalgia such a bad thing? Nostalgia is a longing to return. If you really loved where you came from, if, in essence, you really loved yourself, how can you not want that to exist? It's like wanting your parents keep living.

We're physical objects, we think of ourselves as these kind of free-floating brains, but the brain is such a little part. It's way smaller than we like to think. We think we're these important human beings. We're not animals or anything. But what did we come out of? What are we made out of? We're made of the same stuff as out there.

If we didn't love things, then we couldn't feel their loss. The flip side of loving is losing. I mean, you can't experience one without the other.

I'm not necessarily a happy person. I don't think that happiness is always the right response to a situation. I think we've come to a point in time where people are saying, "Oh, you know, loss and change, that's just normal."

I don't think of myself as fitting into a category. But I had to be careful in all of my books not to repeat things, because I have these ideas, and though the subjects were disparate, the same idea would come up through different portals.

There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.