Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

If I’m going down, I’m going down with lipstick on.

When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.'

It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.

I take my mentoring responsibilities very seriously.

Jesting, often, only proves a want of intellect. [Fr., La moquerie est souvent une indigence d'esprit.]

They’d played “Sweet Home, Alabama” so many times I wanted to crash the party, kill the radio, and knife whoever was selecting the music.

I've got so many weaknesses.

And to be wroth with one we love…Doth work like madness in the brain.

When I was at home I was in a better place