Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.