When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.