Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. Then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'