I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice - cinnamon - burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten o'clock in the morning - everything nice - as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.