Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.