The world is full of horror. Our imaginations struggle to keep up. It would be a poor life without imagining. I’m not sure we can have any salvation, in fact, without imagining.

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.

For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.

The strongest presence is so often an absence.