You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.

There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can't anymore.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.