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.

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.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.

I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.

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.