What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

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

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

People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.