“If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait.”

“A good book is never finished—-it goes on whispering to you from the wall.”

“You ever laughed so hardnobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,no matter what they tried to do to you?”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told.”

“Some people make a bad bed, they just have to lie in it.”

“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”

“I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork. The moment the old man cannot return to.”