What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

so my grandmother was not without humanity. and if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in the garden, they were cocktail dresses she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. even in her rose garden she did not want to appear underdressed. if the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. when my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, "what? and have those people at the cleaners what i was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?" from my grandmother i learned that logic is relative.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

And never forget, there is memory.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.