We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

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

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

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.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out