If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.