--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.