Without curiosity a writer is dead.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

If I have to work on something for too long, then it must be wrong. At a certain point, if I've worked on a sentence for about an hour, then I realize that it's probably not the right sentence and means I'm trying to make something fit that's ungainly.

Writers don't want to appear to be stupid. I don't know - maybe people become writers so that they can prove that they're not. Of course getting a book published doesn't mean that they're not stupid. At a certain point you have to stop trying to prove something and write because you need to think about something and want to communicate, in a very broad sense.

The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.