There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

Every letter was a love letter.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.