I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.