In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

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

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.