Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

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.

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

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

The human heart is a dark forest.