I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction