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?

My great fear is not that I'll run out of ideas. It's that I'll run out of time.

I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

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.

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.