I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.

The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.