Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

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.

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.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.