I love insult, it's always honest.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

I love insult, it's always honest.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.