Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

Imagination is a killer.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

Let the story tell itself.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.