I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.