I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.