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

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

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.

A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

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

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.