I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.