I Don't Have A Love Life. I

[t]he Normal And The Everyday Are Often Amazingly Unstoppable, And What Is Unimaginable Is The Cessation Of Them. The World Is Resilient, And, No Matter What Interruptions Occur, People So Badly Want To Return To Their Lives And Get On With Them. A Veneer Of Civilization Descends Quickly, Like A Shining Rain. Dust Is Settled.

But Family Life Sometimes Had A Vortex, Like Weather. It Could Be Like A Tornado In A Quiet Zigzag: Get Close Enough And You Might See Within It A Spinning Eighteen-wheeler And A Woman.

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!'

If You're Suicidal, And You Don't Actually Kill Yourself, You Become Known As 'wry.

Writing Is Both The Excursion Into And The Excursion Out Of One's Life. That Is The Queasy Paradox Of The Artistic Life. It Is The Thing That, Like Love, Removes One Both Painfully And Deliciously From The Ordinary Shape Of Existence. It Joins Another Queasy Paradox: That Life Is An Amazing, Hilarious, Blessed Gift And That It Is Also Intolerable.