I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

If it's important, your heart remembers.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.