Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.