I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.