I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

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

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.