Her days come and go like birds, her dreams like days.

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.

It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown.

The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -