You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

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

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.