The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.