When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Assume makes an ass out of you and me.

[She was] a copy editor, possessed of the rare capacity to sit all day in a small cubicle, like a monk in a cell, and read with an almost penitential rigor.

We’re an additional $50,000 over budget even before we start,

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

I think it’s very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a...

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled...

For one reason or another, this program has never had a national publication.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you...