It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

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

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

It seems to me that a great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

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.