“Art, after all, is - at its best - a lie that tells us the truth.”

“You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either- you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide.”

“I write under not only the presumption that everything I write is deeply conditioned by everything I’ve already written, but that everything I write changes, retroactively, all those things I’ve already written.”

“I do believe that you can never know yourself let alone the person next to you let alone the person halfway across the world. Yet at the same time I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else s consciousness.”

“If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.”

“That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at. He looked at her face”

“He looked out the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kilometers away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.”