I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.