It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

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.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.