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.

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.