The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

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

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.