I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.