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.

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

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

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.