There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.