Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles - and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech - look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.