I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.