The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

I mean, the old film critics just excoriated me.

The world is continually changing. I think in some ways it's changing in a very positive way.

We have had a long held myth of American exceptionalism.

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

Find somebody else to run your business on a day-to-day basis.