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

I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on 'cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.

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.

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

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.