Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

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

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

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

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

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