Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.