My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

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

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.