Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.