If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel

Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.

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.

I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.

You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.