I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

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.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

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

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.