the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

Why does life need evidence of life?

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

In loving life you love what can't survive.