You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

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

I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.

I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.