With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

What matters most is that we learn from living.