Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.