I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

Susan Rebecca White has a keen sense for how her characters talk and think. An impressive debut.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

I'll write about California someday, I imagine, but I don't know when.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the voice can carry a story.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.

There are no defining moments. There are only your moments to define.

Adversity is the door to opportunity.

If it is orderly and lawful, immigration is good for our economy.

But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs - is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.

I was very happy and honored to create the Professor Garfield Foundation with Ball State to make reading fun.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism

If you can laugh together, you can work together.

Kofi Annan's kangaroo court [is] a clear and present danger to the war on terror and to Americans fighting it all over the world.