Western Attitudes Toward Death.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him, ... This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.