Perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I. - Nicole Krauss

My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A .A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too. I don’t think I’ve trusted any author since who doesn’t address me with that assumption.

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

All novels are, in their way, an act of resistance, since they insist on the importance and uniqueness of the individual life, and refuse to give in to the mass generalities on which governments and economies depend.