This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

My divorce began less than a week before we were married.

Grace Paley was pushing us to be better people when we were still young and capable of change.

unless you are independently wealthy, I urge you to listen to this. If you plan to roll the dice, thinking, Well, surely I’ll get a big book contract at the end of two years that will cover the loan I’ve taken out, the chances are excellent it’s not going to happen.

let me touch on summer programs as well. They can be a lot of fun, as long as you’re honest with yourself about what your goals are: if you want to make friends with other people who want to be writers, have a vacation with an opportunity to learn something, and have the chance to listen for a week or two to the wisdom of a writer you respect—and y

In time, a lot of time, after I left Friday’s and Nashville on a fellowship that allowed me to write my first novel, I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

At every stage of writing a book there is a sense of If only … If only I could find the time to write and if only I could figure out the third chapter and if only I could get my book finished. If only I could find an agent. If only some editor would buy my book. If only I had a good publicist. If only the book would get reviewed. If only they would

It was because of Humboldt that I went on to read the stories of Delmore Schwartz, and fell in love with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.

have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was married. It didn’t matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over.