You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.