And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

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.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

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.

I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even when I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.