“First drafts are for learning what your story is about.”

If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.

We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: “It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.

Writers who can’t invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn’t paint people, so he painted chairs.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.

One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.

I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.

News is only the first rough draft of history.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he was born the same year I was drafted. … That’s a pretty scary thought.

The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers.

As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.

I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes,