Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

People are quite frequently eccentric.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.