The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

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.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

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