I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

Everyone moves for reason. You need a reason to leave everything behind.

When I do think, ‘Man a f—cking motel room with a couple of thousand dollars worth of narcotics would do me right,’ I just look over at my dog and remember that Buster’s never seen me high.

Never forget that the devil is there 24/7 too. He's very, very busy.

Surely, if knowledge is valuable, it can never be good policy in a country far wealthier than Tuscany, to allow a genius like Mr. Dalton's, to be employed in the drudgery of elementary instruction.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

[The Women's Room] is one of those pieces of fiction that reveals itself in a different way every time. It's incredible.

I'm very comfortable in the storm.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Pertussis is a disease that adolescents and adults give to children.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.