I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.