I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.