I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.

After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.

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.

Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.