The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.