I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

I believe that God locates himself at the spot where you recognize your own fallibility....And the paradox of it all has been that whenever I give up I seem to do better.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.