It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

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

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.