A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Movies are too literal.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.