I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.