Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

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.

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

People with good intentions never give up!

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.