“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.”

“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.”

“The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written.' I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page.”

“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.”

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

“The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written.”