Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

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.

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

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

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

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.