I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.

I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.