I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

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

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.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.