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.

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

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.

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me.

There is no such word as Genius, it is just the combination of hard work and determination.

Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.

Only grown-up men are scared of women.

The system is only as good as the person programming it. If you don't have the follow-through, your system is useless. And by the way, it's that way in parenting; it's that way in marriages.

I am not a person who is particularly patient with anyone so I am certainly not going to be patient with myself I think.

This is the first time in my life I've had hair this short. It's always been down to my waist. I can't hide behind my hair any more

I think you owe me something for deceiving me so exquisitely.

Man doesn't dictate what you do or how you do it. If you believe in God, believe in God; have your faith in him. That's where my faith lies.

In life some people trip and some fall but some take that trip and make a beautiful dance out of it.