Time is the school in which we learn.

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

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We write to discover what we think.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.