The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.