I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.