“Discovery is the joy.”

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.

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.

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

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.

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.

Harebrained schemes often lead to great discoveries.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I’d learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only “like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth.”

This is my firm persuasion, that since the human soul exerts itself with so great activity.

I love PBS! I grew up on it. If I had to say which channels were good, I’d say, you got your PBS, your History Channel, your Discovery.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.