If I had to guess what the new Etch-A-Sketch picture is going to be like, it's going to be considerably less to the right. Romney has backed himself into a couple of corners that I don't think will serve him well in the general election, the main one being very harsh stands on immigration, which I think are not only short-sighted but to my mind immoral.

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.