There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

Memory changes as a person matures.

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.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.