When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.

The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.

It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it

The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Life is a means of extracting fiction.