All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.

Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.

When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.

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

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.