In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.