...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

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

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.