Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up some path for being in a family that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I think of him that way as a writer and a familial figure.

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.