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.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

You're looking for ways always as the writer to bring readers into intimacy, you with them with you. Photos can sometimes do the opposite, create distance and perspective, but these somehow didn't. They somehow bring the reader closer.

I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?