I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity goes. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.

Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.

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

Literature is the history of the soul.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.