I collect human relationships very much the way others collect fine art.

Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.

I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day.

All my father saw was what he wanted to see.

[Nabokov's] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird