Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.