I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.