Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.