Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

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

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.