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

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

None of the rest of my life figures here.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

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.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.