Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.