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.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

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.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.