I like to read the paper online. And I love email. And I love nothing better than to be interrupted.

I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.

For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

There comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

Don't all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?

With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I'll be when I look back in days and years to come.

I flew on a plane the week after 9/11.

You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.