The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.