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.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

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

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

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

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.