I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.