I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.