Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

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.

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

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.