If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.