Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.

Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

You're unusual. That's better than popular if you have some courage.

Peculiar as I was, and remain, I was trained to be practical. I'm still amazed at the radical temerity of my friends, you included, Julie, who choose poetry as their vocation. I envy your faith.

I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

Whatever one may say about the perils of workshops, they help writers internalize an awareness of audience.

I figured that to be a writer I would need to have been born in the nineteenth century, be British, or have three names. So I turned my sights elsewhere . . . to acting.

Whatever we know as children, this is the world, eaten whole and without question.

The word impossible says I'm possible

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

I don't have many friends in Philadelphia. I sort of have one. I have the dog and someone else.

Help the Cubans to the utmost counseling his successor while handing over the reins. We cannot let Castro's government go on.

Success in fighting means not coming at your opponent the way he wants to fight you.

There are thousands of grant programs and every program has different requirements and deadlines.

Parents appreciate the child who agrees; they condemn the child who disagrees.

True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

Sin is hell, grace is heaven; what madness it is to look more at hell than heaven.

Explanations are a substitute for trust.