Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.

The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn’t be. We are our brothers’ keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There are consequences to our actions or inactions. Disregard can be an act of violence.