A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

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.

It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.