Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground..

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always lear….

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, p….

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present..

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted..

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find..

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biologic….

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk..

Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine..

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had,….

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people..

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment..

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue..

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time..

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we ….

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but y….

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividl….

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the mo….

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself wit….

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud..

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness..