Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll dis...
Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.
There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings...
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.
The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a c...
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to...
I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that no...
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which...
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific d...
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you we...
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.
