How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.

Pray for rain while digging a well.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. I think we tend to write out our phobias.

God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you.

I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.