Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.

Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

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.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

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

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.