When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

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.

The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.

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.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.