There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

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

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct