When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

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.

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

I work just as much as I always worked. And I can't explain the fact that there have been a series of books coming rather regularly out of me. I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

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.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.