When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

As someone once said, covers to a novel are like bars to a cage. You can watch the tiger, the Komodo dragon, and admire it - its heart, its severity. Even when they carry out an ugly act, it's still fascinating.