I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.