“I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.”

Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.

And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.

Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.