I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level..

...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip..

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them.

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it..

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrive….

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could..

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama..

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowin….

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive..

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow ca….

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They….

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations..

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage,….

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages..

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life..

The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusio….

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe..

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I ….

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it..