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 want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

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.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

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.