You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.

My life is a reading list.

I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.

They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

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.

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