Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

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.

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

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.