“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many chara...”

“Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as writ...”

“[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.”

“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”

“They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, warm, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturne...”

“For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it...”