I wish I knew how to quit you.

...all them things I don't know could get you killed if I come to know them

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.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

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

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

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.