I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

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".

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

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