Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my ‘farm chores’ – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
Your punishment if you’re a woman. Not loved enough.
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another.
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.