Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

People who keep journals have life twice

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.