The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.