"…you have to keep on trying to do. You have to be willing to realize that what you did before isn’t very good. You need to see the problems in it in order to change them. The thing which I’ve always had a horror of, and maybe I’m too much in the other direction is that when I first started writing and first met writers—I’d never met a writer before in my life. When I first published I started meeting all these writers, and every now and then you’d meet someone who’d become so defensive and angry about their work and would claim that the worst books they’d ever written had been their best books, and I just thought, ‘God, I don’t ever want to not know that this was good and this was bad. I never want to lose the judgment of a reader in the ego of a writer.’"

"Introversion — along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women living in a man’s world, discounted because it goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality trait, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform."