Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

I think the act of talking about something - with a friend, or someone in your family, or someone you care about, and you're discussing something that you both admire - can often sharpen your thoughts about what you've read or seen and help you think more clearly about it.

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.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.