I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

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 had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.