The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.