We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.