It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

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

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.