Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

There's no word in the language I revere more than 'teacher.' My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.