I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.