I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.