In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.

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

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

Half my life is an act of revision.