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

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

It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - pe….

My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly….

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

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!.

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

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..

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility..

Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to ….

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..

What makes a sentence, a phrase, a moment, or a scene delightful? Something about recognizing the truth in it, hearing the music in it, understanding….

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know wh….

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even les….

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed..

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice..

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned..

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillati….

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something….

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….

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. F….