A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

Politics isn't in my nature.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

A man had to learn, it was his nature.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.