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

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

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

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?

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

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.