Write from what you know into what you don't know.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.