I’m not qualified to explain how it feels when my wife gives me a certain look.

Love is a religious experience, which then requires me to define religion, which I define as everything I don’t understand.

I’m trying to figure out how to receive unconditional love. That’s hard to do when you’ve never really had it, so I’m trying to navigate that.

Like a true connection – if you are away, you feel an aching, and when you’re together, you feel complete.

When we had children at home. But recently I finished a book about old secrets that I’ve been working on for a long time, and when I was done, I felt a gigantic, joyful relief in having escaped from the corn maze of remembered facts in which I’d been wandering for so long.

I made too much money in my 30s, and it distorted my writing and made me less hungry. Then, in my 40s, I spent all the money on daily life – and now I don’t have it.

In 1999, the British Library auctioned off some of its newspaper holdings. My wife and I formed a non-profit and saved more than 20 tons of these irreplaceable bound newspapers, including the last intact run of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.