Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family.

I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from thei….

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn..

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, befo….

The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and ….

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good,….

Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world..

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep g….

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader..

Respect and fear are two different things..

With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take ….

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write the….

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom..

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about ….

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist..

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco..

Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full ….

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one..

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community....

There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market..

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific..