Good writing is always new.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.