This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

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

When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

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.