Being a reporter took me out of myself and that shaped me as a writer.

Susan Rebecca White has a keen sense for how her characters talk and think. An impressive debut.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

I'll write about California someday, I imagine, but I don't know when.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the voice can carry a story.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

Every 'problem' we face is only a problem because of the way our mind (ego) perceives it. It is, in fact, not a problem at all but rather a lesson we are providing to ourselves in order to evolve.

I believe that life is a journey towards God, and that no one has the right to insist that you go a certain road.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

I thought my Jesus Piece was so harmless 'Till I see a picture of a shorty armless

It's so dense, every single image has so many things going on.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.