“It is the only life I care about—to write, to go out occasionally and ‘lose myself’ looking and hearing and then to come back and write again. At any rate that’s the life I’ve chosen.”

“In my life I haven’t done anything worth writing about, but that’s OK. That’s why I write fiction.”

“I haven't come to the theater to hear about other people's probelms. I've come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again.”

“...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.”

“I’ve always been about pain. In fact, I’m quite incapable of writing anything else, nor would I want to. Where does it come from? Probably the life I’ve lived.”

“You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit.”