The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.