Our teachers are everywhere. Our teachers are right in front of us, and take so many forms. All we need to do is to open our eyes, to be open to and aware of the possibilities. Otherwise, we walk sightless among miracles.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.