Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.

Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

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.