it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

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

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.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

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.