It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the ….

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough..

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, un….

Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming be….

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do..

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through ….

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in ….

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But thi….

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible..

Words at night were feral things..

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it..

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process..

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it..

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly..

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light..

Did the walls of the barn start to tremble With a glory they could not contain? Did anyone wake with the feeling Of peace that they could not e….

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in tha….

One writes to find words' meanings..

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste..

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies..

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. .….