Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

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 prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.

Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.