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

Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

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

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.