Writers are only rarely likable.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Actually, when John died, for the first time I thought - for the first time I realized how old I was, because I'd always thought of myself - when John was alive I saw myself through his eyes and he saw me as how old I was when we got married - and so when he died I kind of looked at myself in a different way. And this has kept on since then. The yellow corvette. When I gave up the yellow corvette, I literally gave up on it, I turned it in on a Volvo station wagon.