One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

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.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

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.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.