If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices . . . The point is not to be debilitated by your pleasures. Maybe I have lucky genes or something but I've never been truly addicted to anything, except pleasure in general.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.