I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.

I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.