I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.