Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.