I went from having 50 listeners to 50 million listeners.

Hugh returned from his trip, and days later I still sounded like a Red Chinese asking questions about the democratic hinterlands. "And you actually saw people smoking in restaurants? Really! And offices, too? Oh, tell me again about the ashtrays in the hospital waiting room, and don't leave anything out."

I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.