Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

People forget years and remember moments.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix.

Work, alternated with needful rest, is the salvation of man or woman.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn't matter, was Rose's Diary. It Mattered.

Taking a new step. . .is what people fear most.

And I hate to see artists who are real safe. I love to see artists swing for the fences sometimes.

Its better to shoot and miss, then to let time run out and wonder what if

I didn't know what was going on at the start in the swirling wind. The flags were all pointing in different directions and I thought the Irish had starched them just to fool us.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

I do love Louboutin shoes, but I need to stop buying them because I don't go to many 'dos,' so they just line up. I'm normally in my trainers.