A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

You are doing something over here and over there someone is telling you a joke, or giving you an important piece of information about sanitation, and no matter how weird the other subject is, there is a connection, or you can make a connection. I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

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