Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.