I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.