The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

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

Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.

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.