When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.