The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.