Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.

Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.

It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."

Art is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.

I'm a person with virtually no feelings.

The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.