The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

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.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore