For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.