Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local...

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every...

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

To be an Instagram model, you absolutely cannot just post pictures of yourself in a bikini for the sake of people seeing you in a bikini - even if that is exactly what you are doing. No, you need to...

Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a...

In the simplest terms, a fast-growing company can't keep growing at the same fast rate forever. It eventually has to slow down.

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if...

An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

Extreme law is often extreme injustice.

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their...

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

Discomfort levels in our societies are rising, or so it would seem. In theory, we invoke diversity and tolerance. But in real life, we raise our hackles and withdraw into ourselves.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.

You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an 'ethic.'

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

You make 'em, I amuse 'em.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.