Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.

I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.

I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.