Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.