When he is sick, every man wants his mother.

The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.