What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

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

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.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.