From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.