Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

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.

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.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.