When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

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

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

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