You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

When he is sick, every man wants his mother.

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

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 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.

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.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.