I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.

There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

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.