Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

Not everyone writes well from a child’s point of view.

By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.

I don’t think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.

The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who’d taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl’s arm with some annoyance, as if she’d have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.

Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.

No, Sully’d decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn’t, any more than he’d blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn’t pay to second-guess every one of life’s decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.