We are the stories we tell ourselves

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

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

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere