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.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

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.

Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.

One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.