Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

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