Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.