There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.