Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.