A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.