I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.