Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name. - Nicole Krauss

The windows in my bedroom face east and have no curtains, and to wake up into that light and a book is joy as I know it. I read many books at once, all of them paper. I think the book must be the most perfect object ever designed by humans. Their physical beauty and how well they work — dayenu! — but then there is the way they often absorb their reader’s presence, too. Tea, ink, greasy fingers, receipts, weather, but more than that, something of the spirit, too, so that years later you can take the book down off the shelf and a flash of your old self leaps out at you. I won’t easily give that up.

The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain [...] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?

(What kinds of books bring you the most reading pleasure these days?) NK: Novels that arrive at their coherence in unusual and elegant ways. That stretch form only to satisfy the book’s mysterious inner command. I love when I feel that both the author and I are surprised at where we find ourselves.