Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

I remember I thought I should become a doctor, even though I had no talent for science whatsoever. Then of course, until I was about sixteen, I thought I might have a shot as a major league baseball player. But once I hit my full adolescence I lost all interest in that. I discovered, in rapid succession, books, girls, alcohol and tobacco, and I've never turned back. Those are the four things I'm most interested in.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.