To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

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

When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes.

Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

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

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.