It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

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.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

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