Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpreta….

It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to i….

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable..

Anne Pitkin's poems have such lyrical sweep, such a sensitive eye for the natural world as it touches the human, that reading Winter Arguments is lik….

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous….

If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. I….

One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his lif….

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency..

When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under..

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time..