Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your i

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

Mothers and daughters have that rivalry thing.

Parents have a right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children.

The thing about love was that it caught you unawares, turned up in the most unexpected places, even when you weren't looking for it.

Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

I care not what subject is taught, if only it be taught well.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It's just the universe breathing.