An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.

I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There's nothing he's afraid to say.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

I went from rotary phone to Twitter. And was appalled at the notion.

She was a pip on the phone. She said, 'We have a meeting of the Rotary Club, be there at noon for lunch.' More than half the people there recognized me.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.