Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained af….

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition..

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie..

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't not….

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened..

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind..

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always crac….

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women h….

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor..

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art..

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember..

Memory changes as a person matures..

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition..

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on..

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart..

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense..

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under ce….

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors..

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind..

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And….

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfo….