When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.