For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments.

Live in the past, but don't remember too much.

Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do.

One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.

My guess [is] . . . that the great majority of Americans are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment. . . . I think the country has long been ready to restrict the use of guns, except for hunting rifles and shotguns, and now I think we're prepared to get rid of the damned things entirely - the handguns, the semis and the automatics.