How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.