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

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.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

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 United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

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

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.