I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.

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.

Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.

How I hate this folly of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

In sexual contact a doorway opens between people, and it is very possible for someone to be abusive at that time with energy.

I jumped out of perfectly good airplanes and it's a great thrill, and it allows me to share in the dangers that the great men - our great men and women in uniform share in on a regular basis.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

Women are young at politics, but they are old at suffering; soon they will learn that through politics they can prevent some kinds of suffering.

You know the FA's the richest football association in the world? Well, I shouldn't say that. They're not the richest at all. What they do is they have the biggest turnover in the world with £325m.

I'm not sure how anyone with a soul can make jokes about the passing of one of the most talented artists this generation will see.

To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself.