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

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

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

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

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.