I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.