The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

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.