Writer

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

Whatever I learned reading 'Scientific American,' nothing can finally compete with your own observations.

I don't feel tentative when I start to write. I've usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go, I just let 'er fling, you know.

You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you're simply not the same as when you started out.

When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

If all I did was pretend I was Wilderness Jimmy, I would go stale. You know, I fish maybe 100 days of the year and bird-hunt, but if I didn't go to Paris once or twice a year, I'd be crazy.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself.

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.

The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling.

I do have trouble with titles.

If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

The reviews are getting better, but they always do, in time, if you're still alive.

I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.