Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.