The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.