A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

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

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

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