Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

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

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.