Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.

I grew up in a fundamentalist protestant family that stressed that we were a select people and so we were to avoid contact with others who did not share our faith.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

To Norwegians, the polka is a form of martial art.

When you come to expect humor of people, you will never get it.

The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don't want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage.