Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.