A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

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

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.