I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

The Blessed Virgin used me like a broom and then put me back in my place.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.

I watched so many movies when I was a kid, and I'd watch them over and over.

The king has been very good to me. He promoted me from a simple maid to be a marchioness. Then he raised me to be a queen. Now he will raise me to be a martyr.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

If only, if only, the moon speaks no reply; Reflecting the sun and all that's gone by. Be strong my weary wolf, turn around boldly. Fly high, my baby bird, My angel, my only

You don't have to wear a sparkly dress all the time! You can wear something that's plain, really, it's okay. No one is going to be mad at you.

Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

I like to get everything done during the early morning hours and the early part of the day.