So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making.

I also developed an unhelpful aversion to asking for favors. Frankly, if I had sought help from others, I would have made far fewer mistakes.

Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”

My half measures are really not good measures.

The book is done when you say it’s done. It’s entirely up to you. It’s your responsibility.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

That's it. Mostly. Really, the people and the issues all come together in a sort of clump or knot, and writing the story is untying, unwinding the knot.

For a serious writer seriously concerned about any moral, social, political, environmental issues, it is a major concern. I’ve been wrestling with it ever since I was 18.

As I got up in my 70s, stories began coming to me more and more rarely. I finished the novel Lavinia at 78. I no longer have the stamina to undertake a new novel, even if I wanted to. So, here I am, an old writer who loves writing – what have I got left to do?

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.