As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again.

Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail.

I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.

There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.