William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.