If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.