Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

Even at eleven, he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.

I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.