One Hand, Five Homes. A Lifetime In

Pet Names Are A Persistant Remnant Of Childhood, A Reminder That Life Is Not Always So Serious, So Formal, So Complicated. They Are A Reminder, Too, That One Is Not All Things To All People.

She Has The Gift Of Accepting Her Life.

I Don't Know Why, But The Older I Get The More Interested I Get In My Parents' Marriage. And It's Interesting To Be Married Yourself, Too, Because There Is An Inevitable Comparison.

It Is A Magical Thing For A Handful Of Words, Artfully Arranged, To Stop Time. To Conjure A Place, A Person, A Situation, In All Its Specificity And Dimensions. To Affect Us And Alter Us, As Profoundly As Real People And Things Do.

It Was Not In My Nature To Be An Assertive Person. I Was Used To Looking To Others For Guidance, For Influence, Sometimes For The Most Basic Cues Of Life. And Yet Writing Stories Is One Of The Most Assertive Things A Person Can Do. Fiction Is An Act Of Willfulness, A Deliberate Effort To Reconceive, To Rearrange, To Reconstitute Nothing Short Of Reality Itself. Even Among The Most Reluctant And Doubtful Of Writers, This Willfulness Must Emerge. Being A Writer Means Taking The Leap From Listening To Saying, "listen To Me."