Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it’s a big deal to bow–or kneel or get knocked down–to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody...

For moderns – for us – there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals...

History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by...

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us … we...

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that...

To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who...

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

I don’t write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.