'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.