“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.”

“Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they will figure out how those stories apply to them.”

“If people don't want to come to the ballpark how are you going to stop them?”

“When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.”

“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”

“People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?”

“In general, past things come to be in the memory not as they were, but as we would like or how we wanted them to have been.”

“I don't work that way. Part of it has to do with an idea of beauty. Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don't move me to do anything. I just want to leave them alone. My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s such a frustrating part of human history”