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

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.

I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money. Actually, I've acquired a fair amount of money that I will never live to spend. So earning money, in a way, depresses me, because I feel it's just piling up.

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.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.