Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.

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.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.

No man ever followed his genius till it misled him.

I wonder how Colin Powell sleeps at night. I would like to have a word with him because he lied. He lied. He lied to me. He lied to my face through the camera at the U.N.

Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.

All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

You killed my dog! Get your affairs in order.

When Jesus got the big questions, he didn't present arguments. He presented himself.

A harmless necessary cat.