Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.