I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

We all have the same dreams.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.