“I’m not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence . . . are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.”

“A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.”

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what's been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.”

On the extinction of dinosaurs: “When they died, they died in a very clean way
. . . This will not happen with human beings. When we die there will be a terrible breath of poison.”