... But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely... Having a big family solves that problem.

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.

I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.