I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.