He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

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.

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.