If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

We write to discover what we think.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.