Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.