I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.