For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.