...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

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

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.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.