You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

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

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

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