Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.