I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.

I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed—not sex—but sex was how we got there.

This is what happens to me. I start out being myself, and end up being my mother.

What seems dangerous often is not--black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there ... are loaded with jeopardy.

I'll turn a sentence over endlessly in my head before it hits the page. By the time it's on the page, it's pretty likely to stay there.

Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person’s going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don’t give them one.

I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.

Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.

Where do you find the parts to make yourself into some other kind of person? Can it be something you read in a book, a gesture you see on the street? Half-smile of a teacher, the walk of a girl on the beach.

When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.

One thing I have learned is that I can get interesting results if I start at the point of most contentment, the most satisfying moment, instead of the most jeopardy.

A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.

There's so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.

It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.

A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o'clock, I am not going to answer the door.

Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty.

They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.

I get rational when I panic.

Look at me. My concerns--are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.

I like my dinner in a bag and my life in a box.

I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her. We could talk about what we read—that was safe territory. This was the way I had a chance of getting her approval. Language. Language and literature.

To my knowledge animals don’t hide from real feeling behind sarcasm or irony.