People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.