Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

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.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?