It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.