There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.