What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

the world is the cradle and your trap.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.