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.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.