New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. 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.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.