I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.