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.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

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.

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

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.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.