I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.