To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.