Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

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.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.