The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don’t always believe in them.
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don’t want to get up. She’s so much more calming than my husband.
I haven’t any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours – and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I’m vacuuming.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
Nothing is accidental in the universe – this is one of my Laws of Physics – except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
In love there are two things – bodies and words.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming – In thinking, not writing.
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.
One of life’s minor satisfactions is forgetting.
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one’s willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.