Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.