If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss
and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

Fear makes us fiction writers.

The more strongly I felt the urge to write, the weaker I felt in face of the enormity of the subject. I feared it, and this fear hovers over me to this day, whenever I try to write on the subject of the Holocaust.

Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.

The thing I fear most is fear.

though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid. I

I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything. (p. 216)

By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.

Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

I can think of no greater nightmare than to lose my ability to read.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.