To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.
When the word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology – not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.
Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
You can’t imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
No, I don’t harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it’s work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I’ve always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
I’m very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
If the book is a mystery to its author as she’s writing, inevitably it’s going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you’re left with is your ambition.
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.
I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn’t have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips.
Bruno, my old faithful. I haven’t sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn’t an ache but something different.
Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.
Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.