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 have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.