Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.