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

I'm seventy-six now. I'm at a stage in my life where I feel a lot of affection and regard for women, and I felt the need to make this clear in some way. I don't know how they'll feel when they read it, but I feel okay about it.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

I am not a ventriloquist.

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

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.