On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

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

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.