Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.