That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

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