If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.