Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet