“Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.”

“Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?”

“Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.”

“What you lost weakened you, could kill you. What you wanted kept you going. What you wanted gave you strength.”

“Marriage is a mystery.”

“Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.”

“I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn't come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.”