The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.