My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.

I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.

There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.

We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.