Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.

Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, Hey, that's not fair.