Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

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

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.