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.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.