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

The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

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

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

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

Nobody does anything for one reason.