When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.