The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.