Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.