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

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.