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

I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

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.

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

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.