I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

We are the stories we tell ourselves

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.