“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

“My desk was a present from Margaret Atwood.After Zen and the Art of Uterus Maintenancesold its first million, she said I needed a placeto write, other than the local bus-shelter.”

“I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?”

“Life turns, and returns death. Where death digs its claws into the grave only to pull out life, as a baby from a womb; and the recycle of air, the recycle of struggles that never achieve satisfaction, in a constant turning world, of an untuned universe.”

“I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.”

“And now, as I'm lying alone in my own bed, I keep thinking about writhing against him last night, naked and vulnerable. Even after we'd both risen and fallen, peaked and plummeted, even after Marcus was physically shrinking from inside me, I couldn't stop clutching, crying, trying. Trying to pull him deeper, deeper, deeper within.Trying to make him more a part of me than I am myself.”