There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.