Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

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

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.