Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.