She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.

The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.