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

It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.

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

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.