I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?