All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

There were moments when I felt seriously unhinged; when I was convinced that I would never, ever recover from what had happened, when it was absolutely clear to me that life from this point on would be constant agony.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them--not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.