Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.