What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.