Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.