I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

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.