My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

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

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.