Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

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

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.