I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

A light rain touches my cheek like an angel's butterfly kisses.

My gran had always told me that a woman--any woman worth her salt--could do whatever she had to.

Beauty is more popular than virtues because it is more visible than virtues.

Of fight or fly, This choice is left ye, to resist or die.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

When you make the connection between your choices and your experiences, you do not have to create the same experiences again.

The Pacific had great hope that when the former President Mitered decided to halt nuclear testing, we had put behind us the issue of nuclear states testing their weapons in our Pacific region.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

It was just as shocking for me to sing opera in a falsetto soprano in Germany.

Don't die with your music still inside.