I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.