To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.