I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.