The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown.

Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

Motherhood is precious.Value it responsibly or don't be

Let them obey that know not how to rule.

The wrong side of the tracks is livelier.

Losses are comparative; imagination only makes them of any moment.

That's a maple leaf, Canadian, not just for being too European but too Canadian. Not so subtly putting [Ted] Cruz's face inside that maple leaf there.

Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife

Honor is the mysticism of legality

I wonder if you are ashamed of calling a Democratically elected government a fascist government.

If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.