“One’s life completely changes based on the rain. After the monsoon, because the dust settles, one can see further and so it feels like one’s eyesight has improved or that one is living in a different country where there is more light.”

Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.

I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don’t try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.

The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.

As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.

I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

There are also so many emotional aspects to money – feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know.

[And yet] it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history.

Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life’s greatest tests alone.

I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.

They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.

Maybe your path is completely different from what you imagined.

You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.