Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

I fear that my mind would starve and that I might find myself in danger if I had no visual information, that it’s chiefly the light, the shapes, the spaces, the colors that I see that compel me to keep moving forward in life and that keep me safe.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I’m on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I’ll sit down at the desk and discover that what I’ve written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

I’ve rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person.

Writing is not a genteel profession. It’s quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses.

I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person.

I grew up in New England at the edge of the Atlantic and have for many years been an avid rower. I've rowed in various places, including the Ganges in India, the River Shannon in Ireland, and the Sea of Galilee.

I'm very curious about the world, foreign cultures.

I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop.