Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

How you spend your days is how you spend your life.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.