"In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?"

"They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other."

"What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid, they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress-lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!"

"There's no reason you should write any novel quickly."

"You can't learn everything you need to know legally."

"But good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive."

"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."

"The lie, of course, is more interesting."

"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."

"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."

"The demands of writing and of real life are not always similar."

"(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it, it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action."

"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."

"In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."

"Half my life is an act of revision."

"Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious."

"A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy."

"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."