Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.

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 continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.