This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.