I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.