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.

People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.

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?

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

Don't give anybody up." He stroked her. "Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us." "There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, "There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help."

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.