Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

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.

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.

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

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.