It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.