Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

In a way, the cancer became an ally because it stopped me from running around so much. I was able to settle down and write things I hadn't had a chance to before.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.