American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.

Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

I start work around 8 a.m. and usually finish around noon. If there's more to do, I do it in the late afternoon, although that isn't prime time for me.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.