If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.