Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.