It’s a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It’s out of a desire to really show what’s going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don’t want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won’t mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

It seemed that if you listened to that snow hissing long enough, you wouldn’t just hear it telling you that it was waiting for you, you’d hear some terrible secret – a secret to turn your life black.

Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very seriously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.

The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.

And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.

When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call “colorful.” After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it’s just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.

There have been times when I reread – or at least leafed through – something because I’d sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it’s all you can do to stay consistent.

David,” I said, “no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.