The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only on….

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or ta….

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom ….

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel..

Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this wh….

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions..

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comf….

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the sa….

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection..

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies..

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else..

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for..

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from nov….

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around..

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as ….

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece..

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke..

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about..

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving..

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imaginat….