In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.