With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up.

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.