The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.

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.

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.

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

She did not care about anything very much. Hope was gone. She existed that was all.

How do you know if you truly found the one? When loving her feels like a calling from God.

Life is a simple straight line between birth and death. The problem is you only realize it at the end of the line.

I was born on a farm. My strength has nothing to do with political apparatus. I get my strength from nature, from flowers.

I found out retirement means playing golf, or I don't know what the hell it means. But to me, retirement means doing what you have fun doing.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Are you suggesting that we reopen the Opera with a murder as an added attraction?

Nourishment means a quality of life; consistency in the way we treat ourselves.

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have