We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

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.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.