In the war time many of the publishing houses were privately owned, a single publisher or a publisher and a few associates who were responsible for everything. They could take whatever risks they wanted, could essentially publish what they liked according to their taste. Publishers today are working for big corporations. They have different pressures. I don't think they can make decisions quite as independently as they used to be able to. They have more corporate and financial responsibilities weighing on them. They're not free to go broke or go to jail.

Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the first time. It was still an adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.

Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

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.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.