To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce