And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.