To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude