For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.

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

I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.