Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

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.

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

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.

Vegtables, what food eats before it becomes food.

You cannot advance if you cannot visualize the end from the start.

Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

It takes so long to make a record and then it takes so long again to release it.

I went out on my own, years ago, to try to create some additional choices in a parallel universe.

A commentary on the times is that the word 'honesty' is now preceded by 'old-fashioned.'

it is the very nature of sin to prevent man from meditating on spiritual things.

I worked with my son when he was much younger; we did L.A. Law together, where I played his father and he played a kid who was suing his father for alienation of affection or something. It was great.

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?