When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

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

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.

What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?