Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.