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.

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.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

…love is by definition freeand if he choose to gowhen I would have him stayperhaps I'll die a bitbut I'd rather sothan taste his absent minded kissand lie uneasy in a masked embrace

There may be people who have more talent than you, but there's no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do - and I believe that.

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

The greatest difficulty always comes right before the birth of a dream.

A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e , where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

The unwillingness to be accountable to a spouse makes most men, and now women, vulnerable to sin in their lives.

People who are chronically tardy never understand the many ways in which they screw up the schedules of people who are punctual and 'normal'.

I don't do anything in order to cause trouble. It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble. I'm proud to be a troublemaker.