It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

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.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.