...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.