Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.