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

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.

You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.

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

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

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

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