Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.