Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Once I was in Texas, where they had this thing called Ralph the Swimming Pig. You went into a theater and you were looking through a great big window at people dressed as mermaids swimming around with oxygen tanks. One of the mermaids had a bottle of milk, and a small Ralph the Swimming Pig dove in and swam over. Naturally, afterward, I said in the cafeteria, "What happens to the Ralphs when they get bigger? Would you serve Ralphs who have retired?" "Oh no! We would never do such a thing."

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.