Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I can write anywhere.

The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

I do have trouble with titles.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

Yeah, but now suddenly – you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

Michigan is two radically different places – the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

I couldn’t run a tight schedule, and if you’re any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you’re trying to help them, but you don’t have any time left to write yourself.

I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy… or they become legend.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don’t do it unless you’re willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there’s a major explosion.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I’m not rational enough to be a good journalist.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York – in case you haven’t noticed.

I’ve never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

After a lifetime of world travel I’ve been fascinated that those in the third world don’t have the same perception of reality that we do.

I’m actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it’s the place I know best.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

So when I made some money, I didn’t have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it’s about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven’t had many complaints.

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.