I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.

I do not Twitter. I don't want to Twitter, and I don't see any point in Twittering. The last thing I want to do is tell people what I'm doing at the moment because I'm probably not doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

I think a writer is not an ideal husband... Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they're living with, or they get irritable with the people that they're living with when the people insist on being noticed.

I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.