Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It's a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States.