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.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.