“You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

A lot of people question my image and why I do what I do, and the answer is because this is how I want to present myself.

I am not talking about selfishness or self-interest. When I ask, What will make you happy?, I mean, What way of loving others feels right for you? Choose a way of loving that makes you happy, and your efforts will be play rather than work.

Don’t think that she is one of those rude women of whom there are so many-on the contrary, she is utterly courteous and pleasant. If you greet her, she will answer you right away and converse with you!

We don’t have all the answers … as we get older, our bodies need repair.

She is scared to love again, because people change their minds. She is scared to love again, because people leave with no answers, and she is sick of thinking it’s because of her.

My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can’t be reduced to a contest.