Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

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.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

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.