My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

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.

Keep passing the open windows.

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language

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

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.