I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

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.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

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.

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