Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

I was obsessed with Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin; I watched 'Mama's Family' religiously.

My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father.

In 1984, Jim Koch used his family's lager recipe to start Boston Beer Company, which has since become the largest 'craft' brewer in the country. He brews Samuel Adams, a rich lager named after the American revolutionary that comes with the tagline, 'Take pride in your beer.'

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.