“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.”

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.

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.

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.

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.

Nobody gives you a chance, you got to take chances.

Second chances, are filled with humans hoping for a third.

One chance is all you need.

Although I’ve played a wide variety of roles, I’ve never had the chance to act in a story written specially for me. It’s a pity as they are the only stories that really let you reveal your personality.

When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.

Women, you overheated dipsomaniacs, never passing up a chance to wangle a drink, a great boon to bartenders but a bane to us–not to mention our crockery and our woolens!