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

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.

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.

We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.

If you are born black, it is better to be born now than in any other time in United States history. My grandson is black. His life is a different life than if he had been born when I was born.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.