Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

My father was in the First World War.

When there's a war, people get married.