My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

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

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