The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.