Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.