If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

Living where I live New York I don't think anyone's going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it's of your place and means that you aren't forgotten; someone's noticed what you have been doing with your life.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else