It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.