All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

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

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

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

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.