The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.