You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Writers are only rarely likable.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.