I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

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.

None of the rest of my life figures here.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.