A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.