A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death. The number has no meaning as long as you're fit and healthy. But you know that you only have so much time left and you don't know how much it is. It could be a very short time.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.