If I'm going to feel estranged and alienated and away from home I don't want anyone interrupting it to debate which berries to have in their pancakes.

I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.

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

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

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.

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

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?