You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.