The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

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

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.