What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

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

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.