Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.