I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

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 take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.