In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

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

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.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

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.

We are the stories we tell ourselves