Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty..

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape..

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, pok….

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there….

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them..

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know..

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page..

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events..

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!.