Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: "It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.