Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world.

When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under.

It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.