I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls' dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It's all there is.

There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way

Both our opinions are rooted in our experience," I said. "Both of them are true, it's just that we've had different experiences.

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.