In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.