You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It's always something very specific.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.

Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.