My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.