It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

Art is too long, and life is too short.