It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.