For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?