"I'm very fond of Cheever."

"The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of hi…"

"He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen…"

"Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time."

"Art is the triumph over chaos."

"I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone."

"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness."

"A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly w…"

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief …"

"...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers."