Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

I am not a ventriloquist.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.