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 you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

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

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

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.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.