All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

All of this strife on the political front might just be the death throes of another set of [less-honorable] American beliefs, that have, at their core, the notion that equality is something the privileged group "gives" to those not so privileged - a reaching down, as it were.