Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.

He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.