The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.