A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

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.

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

One writes to find words' meanings.

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.

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.