In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

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

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.