[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

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

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.