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

And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.

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.

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.