but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

We are formed by what we desire

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.