She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

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.

When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.