It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one