Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?