With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

My mom was paranoid about my safety.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.