I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

Along the (writing) way accidents happen, detours get taken... But these are not "divine" accidents; I don't believe in those. I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

The object of war is to survive it.