As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.