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.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.

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.

...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.

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

I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.