There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.