Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.