What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn

At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.

Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.