­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.

Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.