Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

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

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.