I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

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

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

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

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.