The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.