Popularity has become its own justification.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.