All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.

I went through college in the 1960s without having any idea that I was going to have to make a living. When I graduated in 1968 it was quite a shock to find out that there was a world out there and that it wasnt going to support me.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.