He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

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

Death means you are in the third person.

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

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.