All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

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

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.