We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
I’ve always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you’re the kind of person who’s going to have that feeling about a dog you’re definitely going to have that about a child.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Most death now happens in hospitals. It’s been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that’s a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.
What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don’t read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn’t what I want to write.