The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Call me the author.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

I am always writing to myself.

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

I lead a very conventional life.

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

I never think people are too careful with me.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.