Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.