Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you're the kind of person who's going to have that feeling about a dog you're definitely going to have that about a child.

We write to discover what we think.

We are the stories we tell ourselves

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

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.