I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.