If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

...the change was adjustment without improvement.