Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

I'm so old that when I started keeping a diary they were in actual books, and I think that's one the reasons that I've never written about sex. Because early on you had to worry that someone was going to find your diary, so it's bad enough to be writing like Joan Didion, but writing like Joan Didion about sex acts you'd performed with somebody you had known for 20 minutes, that's a bit worse. So I would write in my diary, "I met J. and we had sex five times last night." But I would never write about what we did.

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

If I'm stuck, I get up from my chair and I wash windows. Or... clean the bathroom. Or vacuum the attic. There's always something to be done.

I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.