I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.