Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.