Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.