In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen--a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.

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

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

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.