And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

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

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

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 was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

Writers will be judged by what they write.