Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.

He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.