I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.

Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.

Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they’d envy you that. But since you don’t, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren’t happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.