You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.
Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.
Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
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.