“Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.”

“His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization”

“...fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself...You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens... By the time you get out of the marsh, you will have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.”

“He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.”

“... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.”

“It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.”

“That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.”