Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.