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

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

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.

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.