After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

A canteen I remember vividly, and maybe one other thing, I can't remember. And I knew then that he had bought them in an army surplus store that day and he wanted to maybe enhance himself in my eyes, and say, "Well, yes, I have been in the army." Or [he] simply just didn't want to disappoint me. It could have been one or the other. But I knew that he had lied to me. And this filled me with a tremendous sort of anger towards him. At the same time, knowing he was trying to please me, so feeling good about him.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.