The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

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

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.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.