Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.

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

I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.