Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.