«Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere . . .You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.»

«She realized as a girl of eight that if she sat down and wrote her stories, she could escape the parts of life she didn't like, embroider the parts she did and thus control the life she had.»

«Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.»

«Sometimes he advertises himself assiduously, writing a few words and then rushing to the talk show to wave his flag.»

«Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.»

«Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.»

«Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.»

«She writes like a loom, producing her broad rich fabric with hardly a thought of how it will make up into a shape, while I write to cover a frame of ideas.»

«Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.»

«Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a traveler?and novelists are often travelers?is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.»