Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.