It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I am more or less reading all the time.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.