But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

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.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.