The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

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

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.

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

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.