The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.