We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

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.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.