I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

The Pivot Questionnaire that I ask other people, when I have on rare occasion answered it, the answer to the question, "What turns you on?" Is words. Not mine, other people's. Words, words, words, that's what turns me on.

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.

I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.

When you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.