I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.