My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents', my brother's, even Tom's, had failed to do. Love was required of me now--to be given, not merely to be sought and returned.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.