I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

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

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.