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

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.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

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

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

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.