Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

Human life is fiction's only theme.

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.