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

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

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

What reality was ever made by realists?

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

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.