The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don't feel good all the time. There's a lot of down, a lot of misery.

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.