Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.