Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

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

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.