Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.