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.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

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

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.