The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.