The real writer is one who really writes.

I think we validate our lives through our actions.

History is a game played backwards only.

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.