Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

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

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.