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.

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

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.

Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is.

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.

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

It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.