Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. - Doris Lessing

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.