Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one..

Travel definitely affects me as a writer..

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever..

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to sp….

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new a….

A real diamond is never perfect..

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes ar….

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour..

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is..

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up..

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. ….

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines..

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, ….

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff..

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness..

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out..

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whol….

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imaginat….

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it w….

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the H….