You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.