But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

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.

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

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

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.