The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.

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

there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.