If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.

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."