It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.