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

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.