Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.