But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.

Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.