I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.